Thank You! HowStuffWorks Express would like to thank the staff of the North Carolina Zoo for their assistance with this article! Special thanks to Dr. Stephen Miller, Dr. Mike Loomis, Rod Hackney, Gin Wall and Tom Such.

A zoo is a great place to go if you want to see animals. At the zoo, you can see things like zebras, tigers, giraffes and elephants. You can often get closer to them than you would ever be able to in the wild. It can be an amazing experience.

There is a part of the zoo that may be even more amazing, but usually you can't see it. This is the stuff going on behind the scenes. Hundreds of people are working to keep the animals happy and healthy. And for some animals, those same people are working incredibly hard to keep them from going extinct. It turns out that if it weren't for zoos, some animal species would already be gone, and several others would soon disappear.

Photo Courtesy North Carolina Zoo A lion at the North Carolina Zoo

How do you feed animals like giraffes and elephants? What happens when an animal gets sick? Where do new animals at the zoo come from? To answer these questions and many others, we visited the North Carolina Zoo in Asheboro, N.C. - one of the largest zoos in the world!

Going to Zooniversity In the past, volunteering has been a good way for students to get inside a zoo and see how it works. Some zoos are cutting back on their volunteer programs though. At the North Carolina Zoo, there is actually a high school right on zoo property. It is called the Asheboro Zoo School. There is a similar school in Lincoln, Nebraska as well. These schools give students a chance to learn about the zoo first hand. Several colleges offer zoo programs. For example, Davidson County Community College (near the N.C. Zoo) has a new zoo program. Besides classroom learning, where students learn about zoo technology and practices, students in the program often work as interns at the N.C. Zoo.